Southwest Airlines Cancels Flights Over Holidays Again.

The optics aren’t great. Southwest was fined a record $140 million by the Department of Transportation just last week for the thousands of flights it canceled over the holidays in 2022. “It will never happen again,” CEO Bob Jordan said earlier this month.

In fairness to him, it didn’t happen again this year–not on the scale of 2022 anyway.

If the severity of last year’s holiday travel meltdown was down to Southwest’s outdated technology and ineffective crew scheduling systems, this year’s was more like bad luck.

Thick fog at Chicago’s Midway International Airport was to blame–Southwest has a major hub at the airport, operating more than 90% of flights’. On Sunday, Southwest canceled 293 flights, or 6% of its schedule, while more than 30% of all flights departing from or arriving at Midway were canceled, according to data from flight tracking website, FlightAware. 

The association between holiday travel chaos and Southwest may be seeping into the public consciousness, although that’s slightly unfair given the airline’s efforts this time around and its clear improvement.

The low-cost carrier had the chance to show that it has become more operationally resilient in the face of disruption. It proved that it has.

Between Dec.23 and Dec.26, Southwest canceled 783 flights, compared with 7,185 over the same period last year. Granted, the weather was worse and more widespread last year but Southwest’s problems snowballed as a result of displaced crews–continuing days after its rivals returned to normal operations. It ended up canceling more than 16,000 flights between Dec.21 and Jan.2.

This year, the carrier seems to have had more success containing the disruption. In fact, Southwest deployed one of its new measures developed to prevent a repeat of the 2022 fiasco. It activated its ‘disruption pod’, a team assembled to identify crews in danger of missing connections and reaching working-hour limits, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The shares have fallen 13% in 2023, after starting the year on the back foot as investors digested the fallout of the holiday disruption. In comparison,
Delta Air Lines
is up 24%,
American Airlines
has climbed 11% and
United Airlines
has risen 12%. Southwest stock has finished the year well, though, rising 14% in December.

There will be more tests ahead for Southwest’s renewed resilience but its handling of the past few days is, for now, a step in the right direction.

Write to Callum Keown at [email protected]